Ruth Crawford's 1932 song “Sacco, Vanzetti” commemorates the notorious trial and execution of the Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti during the previous decade. On April 15, 1920, a paymaster and a guard for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company were robbed and fatally shot in South Braintree, Massachusetts, by four to five men. On May 5, 1920, the police arrested two Italian immigrants—Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler—as suspects in the crime. The newly appointed director of General Intelligence in the Department of Justice, J. Edgar Hoover, oversaw the proceedings, and prosecutors for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts emphasized the defendants’ status as Italian immigrants and their anarchist politics, while failing to present a convincing case against them. The prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti received worldwide publicity, and became a powerful symbol of an unjust American legal system. After a six-week trial, during which the men's politics and patriotism were on trial as well, they were convicted in July 1921 of armed robbery and murder, and in April 1927 were sentenced to death. Thousands of people protested the verdict, and subsequently, during the appeals process, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller appointed three prominent men to a blue ribbon committee: Samuel Stratton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University; and retired Judge Robert Grant. Upon the committee's recommendation, Governor Fuller sustained the death sentences, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in August 1927. Recognizing that the trial and verdict were tainted by prejudice against immigrants and those who held anarchist views, Governor Michael S. Dukakis issued a proclamation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of their execution, that August 23, 1977, would be “Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day” in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from [their] names … from the names of their families and descendants, and so, from the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”